At Long Last, a Universal Shopping Cart for the Web

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At Long Last, a Universal Shopping Cart for the Web

WIRED

The abandoned shopping cart is an e-commerce entrepreneurs’ nightmare. More often than not, shoppers browse an online store, load up their carts, then ditch them. Some studies estimate around two-thirds of shopping carts are abandoned just before the transaction is complete. In some cases, shoppers never planned on buying in the first place. In others, steep shipping prices or a long checkout process put them off. Sometimes, they wander off to other sites and forget about the stuff they wanted just minutes before. And, I’ll confess, I’ve had dreadfully lazy moments when I’ve given up on a pair of boots just because my wallet’s in the other room.

Whatever the reason, e-commerce companies always are on the hunt for new ways to convince customers to seal the deal. One New York startup may have the answer: A single shopping cart for the entire internet.

The experience is seamless for shoppers. For online stores, it’s a potentially massive business opportunity.Keep is a mobile app that works a lot like Pinterest. Users select merchandise from across the Web and add it to Keep, which acts as a unified storefront. It’s an elegantly designed app, full of nicely curated content, but that’s not what makes Keep interesting. Last month, the two-year-old company released a feature called OneCart, a universal shopping cart that allows Keep users to select any item from any online store, add it to a single cart, and check out with a single click. Keep stores every user’s credit card and shipping information, so you type it in just once. Instead of visiting three different stores and entering your information three different times, you open Keep, surf the web to find any item—from a claw-foot tub at Home Depot to a handmade purse on Etsy—and add them to a single shopping cart. One more click and you’re finished.

In a sense, Keep is trying to beat Pinterest at its own game. Speculation on potential business models for the hugely popular but revenue-challenged site has included that users could buy stuff they pin directly through the site. But so far, that hasn't happened. At Keep, on the other hand, the new shopping experience seems seamless. For online stores, it’s a potentially massive business opportunity.

“If this can cut into shopping cart attrition, this would be a big thing for the e-commerce players,” says Steven Osinksi, a marketing professor at San Diego State University. “We’re talking about tens of billions of dollars of lost sales.”

Fixing Checkout Web-wide

Launched in 2012 by About.com founder Scott Kurnit and former Rodale exec MaryAnn Bekkedahl, Keep.com started as what Bekkedahl describes as Pinterest with “no cats, no crafts, no recipes, just shopping.” Like Pinterest, Keep is a “discovery platform” where users can browse and curate images of pretty dresses and minimalist jewelry from a variety of websites. But if a shopper wanted to buy an item from, say, Anthropologie, Keep would automatically direct that user to Anthropologie’s online store to process the order and check out. The system worked well enough on a desktop browser, but it wasn’t until Keep released its mobile app in October that Bekkedahl says the team realized how broken that experience actually was.

MaryAnn Bekkedahl.

Keep

“Every time I wanted to buy something, I ended up on a retailer’s mobile web browser, and that sucks,” she says. “We said, ‘Let’s fix mobile checkout for Keep, and while we’re at it, let’s fix it web-wide.”

OneCart is not the first service to call itself a universal shopping cart, but Bekkedahl says it is the first that is actually universal. That’s because most other companies, like Lyst and Cosmic Cart, sign retailers on one-by-one, she says. While they may have one hundred, or even hundreds, of retail partners, they can’t truly cover every store on the internet.

Keep claims it can. But its approach is much trickier to pull off, because it requires real human labor to work. When consumers add items from a variety of stores to OneCart and click pay, they haven’t actually paid each of those stores. They’ve paid Keep. Keep simply takes that order. After that, its small staff of part-time employees (Keep calls them “go-getters”) visits each online store and manually completes the purchases. Keep is the middleman, or as Bekkedahl prefers to call it, “a concierge service.”

The Everything Cart

The customer, however, may never know that. To use OneCart today, shoppers open the Keep app, click a web icon, browse stores, and add items. Once those items are in the Keep store, they click “Buy.” The next release of the product will be even simpler, Bekkedahl says. In that version, when shoppers browse other online stores, a “Buy” button generated by Keep will automatically appear at the bottom of the page, though making that happen turns out to be a major technological and design challenge.

“We need to scrape that retailer page really fast, so that when we bring the item back into Keep, we have the image, the price, its availability, its size, color, and description,” she says. “If it takes us 50 seconds to scrape the page that’s a bad experience.”

Bekkedahl says the development team is still working out the kinks in the “Buy” button, but that’s far from Keep’s only challenge. For starters, the company has to contend with the fact that there is, in some respects, already a universal shopping cart out there. It’s called Amazon. For many shoppers, Amazon is the first place they look for any and all items. Convincing people to come to Keep first will be daunting. That said, there’s no comparing the experience of shopping for clothes on Amazon, where even top brands tend to look tacky, with the experience of shopping for clothes on Keep, which is as aspirational and stylish as shopping can get. Keep should have no problem hooking the Urban Outfitters set with its sleek and trendy homepage, but attracting a larger audience could be more difficult.

>OneCart could radically expand the size of the e-commerce market—even if it radically shrinks the remaining balance in the rest of our bank accounts.

Keep

Then again, Keep's founders shouldn't want to grow too fast. With just 25 full-time employees and 18 "go-getters," Keep doesn't have the endless scaling potential that, say Pinterest has. Growing Keep's employee base as its customer base grows could be an overhead disaster. Right now, Keep is bringing in minimal commission fees from affiliate networks every time it facilitates a sale, but the company will have to introduce new revenue streams if it wants to keep up with employee costs. Bekkedahl says the company is considering launching a subscription service, in which customers can pay for free shipping or even charging customers outright for the service. But, she says, "all of that is next year's project."

In the meantime, OneCart has already been used to shop at 1,533 different stores in the month since its release, Keep says. One customer even bought 23 items from 18 different stores in one checkout. That doesn’t mean that OneCart, too, won’t have to face the possibility of shopping cart attrition itself. But, if Bekkedahl and company are right that fewer carts will equal more buying, OneCart could radically expand the size of the e-commerce market—even if it radically shrinks the remaining balance in the rest of our bank accounts.